The coding of sex in Spanish nouns

Abstract

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. Traditional views on how sex is coded in Spanish nouns are revolutionized in this article. To the initial discovery that sex coding yields not only singlets and doublets but also triplets, it is added that Spanish employs three sex coding modes whose productivity correlates with structural cost. The suppletive and the derivational modes require investing in sex-specific morphemes, which makes them costly, whereas the inflectional mode achieves maximal economy by exploiting the exponent of another grammatical category: declension. The transfer of productive sex coding to the grammar is another major innovation. Lexical Specification is appropriate to formalize the suppletive and the derivational modes, but it is defeated by the intricacies of the inflectional mode, for which a semantic process of Sexualization is introduced. It is further uncovered that syncretism is pervasive and obscures the effects of Sexualization partially or fully. Because sex originates at a deeper level than gender and declension, both of the latter categories can conceal it; hence the common misperception that inflectional sex triplets are doublets or even singlets. The analysis also reveals that plurality facilitates genericity and that inflectional markers are generated from features which, for most words, can be grammatically supplied since they are predictable.